Best Vista Error EVAR, gaming, and software requests, and an Ubuntu gripe

[storkus at storkus.com]

On Tue, 20 May 2008 11:34:52 -0700, "Matt Graham"
<danceswithcrows at usa.net> said:
> After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
> > Am 19. Mai, 2008 schwatzte storkus at storkus.com so:
> >> Next up, the question: has anyone tried gaming on FreeBSD?  I've seen
> >> past stuff mainly about problems WRT native software liking ALSA over
> >> OSS, but I don't know if that's been solved or got worse.  What about WINE
> >> and its descendents? 
> > I'm always trying to find gaming info for *NIX. I discovered atanks last
> > week, but doubt it'd fit real gaming cravings.
> 
<snipping emulator stuff>

I guess I should've been more specific.  I'm not looking at playing
console stuff, but I appreciate the info for possible future use!

Right now, the programs are based on the Quake engines, specifically
Urban Terror running ioquake3 and Enemy Territory:Quake Wars running
on the Quake 4 engine.  id software makes all their engines available
natively on Linux, which is one reason why I've been playing them.
There are many game SERVERS running on FreeBSD out there, but I'm
having a hard time finding client info.  If it wasn't for Darwin, I'd
say a Mac binary would work, but I'm sure it won't.

> Wine is hit-or-miss.  If you have a specific program you want to run,
> it's 
> always best to check it out at winehq.com and see if it can be made to
> work 
> without major hassle.  Wine *still* can't run Progress Quest without 
> graphical glitches (sigh).

Oh yes, I know.  In my case it would be one of the Valve games (Half
Life,
Counter Strike, Team Fortress, etc) most likely.  Again, though, the
problem here is not whether the game will work with Wine, but whether
Wine will get along with FreeBSD.

> 
> >> As I'm writing this, I recall that, on modern Slackware anyway, they use
> >> modules and an initrd image, so maybe that's it.
> > Yup. Everything does at this point. The kernel is too big to boot if you
> > don't put some stuff in modules.
> 
> It's easy to put together a kernel that doesn't require an initrd.  It's
> just 
> that that kernel will only boot on a very limited subset of hardware. 
> One of 
> the first things I always do when installing a new distro is to get a
> recent 
> vanilla source tarball and build a vanilla kernel that doesn't require an 
> initrd because it's got everything needed to mount / built in.  (This
> also 
> removes bugs caused by distro patches, and typically makes it easier to
> build 
> and use third-party kernel modules.)

Total Ditto.  The problem is that I was trying to use the source
included
with the distro since I obviously didn't have internet access at the
moment.
Perhaps this is where everything bombed.  Or maybe something weird with
the leftover modules.  My last kernel build (on my old desktop) I made
the
kernel non-modular, but I can't do that here because of the MadWIFI
thing.

That's also one other reason I was considering FreeBSD: their support
for
Atheros chipsets is very good, with the driver developer working for
them.
That and BSD 4.3 was my very first UNIX experience, which also probably
is one reason I'm so fond of Slackware--well, that and I'm familiar with
it, having run it for over a decade now on all my machines.

> 
> -- 
>    "Oh bother," said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
>    --MHR on alt.fan.pratchett

LOL!!

Mike